"It was my first time at a Cloud Expo show, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But man, what a blast it turned out to be. Great exhibits, great audience, great floor traffic, great conversations with IT leaders and folks in the channel."

With those words, Tom Gaydos (pictured) - Director, Marketing & Sales Operations at Evolve IP - begins a blog post on the "Cloud IQ" blog in which he reports on Evolve IP's experiences at the 10th International Cloud Expo, which was held in New York's Javits Center June 11-14, 2012.

Gaydos is just the most recent of a great many participants at 10th Cloud Expo who have taken the time and trouble to comment on how much they and their company enjoyed what has now become the cloud computing industry's premier bi-coastal event. (11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, will be held November 5-8 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.)

"Now that the smoke has cleared," Gaydos continues in his blog, "I’d like to share what I felt were our own highlights, as well as some of the hot topics I heard most on the show floor."

Here's how it went for Evolve IP:

"Our VDI demos were a big hit. Our demo of our cloud-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) running on the iPad turned out to be the hottest thing going. I would go so far as to say it stole the show. In our demo, we hooked up an iPad (and/or Motorola Xoom) to one of our 26-inch monitors; fired up the Evolved Office: Desktop; and showed the potential of this technology with the Office 2010 suite, and even Photoshop CS6. People were flocking to it like flies to honey.

We were also demonstrating VDI running on a 5+ year old Dell laptop. Since the desktop is running in the cloud, it was behaving like a Quad Core i7 with 8Gb RAM rather than an early Core 2 Duo with 2Gb RAM, which is the actual hardware on the machine. Windows 7 running fast on an iPad is cool, but showing it running so snappy on antiquated hardware is just as powerful.

The performance and user experience were outstanding, and many people were blown away. I’ll admit to having trepidations about our ability to demo this technology due to the, shall we say, minimal, bandwidth available at the Jacob Javits Center during the show. The worrying turned out to be for naught; however, as our VDI demos went smooth as glass."

Staff at the EvolveIP booth at Cloud Expo New York conferring about its iPad VDI demos

Gaydos describes next the "collaborative vibe" that he sensed at Cloud Expo:

"We synced up with a lot of our partners at Cloud Expo and made some new friends. It was great to see our partners at Fortress ITX, Princeton Hosted Solutions, and Intelisys. We had a great time at Server Central’s networking reception at the Ainsworth and made some new friends with our booth neighbors at GlobalKnowledge and Ricoh. The show had a very collaborative vibe to it and, technology aside, it was the people that made it a memorable experience."

Gaydos also offers insights into the more general themes at Cloud Expo New York:

"As far as hot topics on the show floor, the big ones were cloud security, cloud performance enhancement, and cloud reliability. The talk was around security was mostly around data encryption and data access. These security discussions were being driven by the folks you would suspect; the vendors, network admins, and top-level IT leaders.

What surprised me the most were the amount of application developers in attendance. Developers are looking for ways to capitalize on the cloud, and are trying to figure how to use, for example, virtual desktops as a delivery mechanism for some of their apps. They were also asking how they can leverage cloud hosting, cloud servers, and cloud architecture not only for their own organizations, but also so they can advise their customers. Development shops are asked all the time about these things, and they need good answers."

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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